darkness with you
by strangervision
Summary: Clint dies on a mission. Natasha struggles to cope. She's not alone, no matter how much it feels like it. (Clint/Natasha, warning for major character death.)


_when we touch  
we enter touch entirely_  
(The Truth The Dead Know, Anne Sexton)

Her eyes are smarting with the smoke in the air, and she barely hears Director Fury over the comms saying, "Widow, report!" enough, but she yells back that she's there anyway. She briefly notices that Clint isn't doing the same, but she pushes the nagging worry to the back of her mind and makes sure she takes down all the men she's led into the alleyway. Her part of this fight is done, then, because she knows that Clint has the rest of them and could take them down easily, she makes her way warily to the extraction point. They're going back in different planes, goodness knows why, but before she knows it, she's back at base.

She's just walking back to her room in the SHIELD headquarters when a cold voice comes over the PA systems and calls, "Agent Romanoff, report to medical wing."

Her heart beating harder against the cage of her ribs, she hurries her footsteps just enough to cut down on walking time. When she gets there, Steve takes her arm gently and pulls her towards the operating theatre. She casts him a confused look, and it's no more than a small glint in her eye – her emotions are caged within her body, protected from any external threat looking for a chink in the armour.

Steve doesn't reply, but she thinks that he looks sorry, and her mind runs, frantic, through all the reasons for regret. They flit too fast for her to catch, and eventually she sinks back into an outwardly composed uneasiness, letting her stomach find regularity in its own churning.

"Agent Romanoff," director Fury greets before her, and she snaps her gaze up to meet his. The eye contact is sharp and clean, but Fury seems to soften a little.

She knows the words that are coming before they do, but she can't catch them when they float in front of her, a little out of reach, sounding for all the world like they're light-years away. Natasha realises briefly that sound does not travel in space, that space is void and without gravity, and she thinks that she might be somewhere there right now because everything is cart-wheeling further from her, her face a perfect stoic mask of calmness, her body stiff right down to the hairs on her skin, her insides detaching and swirling away from her.

_Agent Barton is down._

The rest of it drowns in a black hole at the back of her mind.

She can't quite reconcile the words with anything she knows, and because she is unsure, she finds her footing in remaining still and quiet, not letting anything betray her. She schools her body into obedience, and then starts to grab at the unhinged bars of her mind and structure them into a table; metal beams; anything that will help her get her grasp of the situation. She runs through the possibilities: they're lying, they didn't say _dead_, he needs to be on a solo mission, it's not him, they mistook him for someone else –

Someone wheels a covered gurney out. The white sheet is stretched over a frame that looks too much like his. She knows better than to lose it, than to let go of the bars of her mind that she's so doggedly holding onto right now. The medical nurse looks up at her, and those eyes are filled with part fear and part sorrow. Natasha steps towards the gurney, her arms crossed over her ribs, and she reaches a steady hand (that is shaking so hard inside it couldn't hold the weight of the world that she feels she might need to, all the time) to the sheet and looks up at Fury at the same time.

"I need to," she swallows past the tightness and the screams in her throat, "Can I see him?"

Fury nods, and Natasha doesn't meet his gaze because she hates to see the unravelling that begins in the one eye, and that solid black eye patch that will only dredge up all the memories of Clint making fun of it. She cannot come undone, he is not dead. She will not grieve. He will laugh, she thinks, if this is a prank and she allows for sentiment.

She closes her fingers in the sheet and the simple action hearkens back to when he crawled into her bed to ward of her nightmares and she woke with her hand in his shirt, but she brushes that away and pulls back the sheet.

His face is pale and drawn, shuttered, like there isn't anyone home and so the windows and doors have been closed. She closes her teeth on the inside of a cheek and worries at it, her lips parting as she draws her fingertips over the bridge of his nose, then a warm cheek. She knows that the body temperature drops one and a half Fahrenheits an hour. She also knows that this has the possibility of being a lie.

Abruptly, as though that thought jolts her back into her mental scaffoldings – with their beams holding fast and not giving way – she pulls her hand back and stiffly pulls the sheet back up. She feels Steve come up behind her and rest his big hands against her arms, just above her elbows. She lets him hold her, more for his reassurance than her own.

Fury is watching her, she knows, with his one good eye, and she allows herself a second of that drop – the one that will drag her down if she lets it – and meets his firm gaze. There is warmth there, and something inside her locks down at that – warmth means cementing the fact that Barton is gone, but he may not be – he isn't dead, no one said it and no one declared it – and she will not put the final nail in this coffin.

He seems to know not to offer consolation or ask if she's okay. Instead, Fury says, "Downtime, Agent Romanoff, for as long as you need. Come back when you see fit." He turns on his heel and strides away, and Natasha wants to laugh at his black, billowing trench-coat behind him, but she swallows the hysteria bubbling up from her guts and steps away from Steve. He lets her, and she lets him drive her back, but she won't speak to him.

He tries, when they're parked safely in the basement of Stark Tower.

"Natasha, I'm so sorry," he says.

She swallows his sympathy and it tastes like bile, like everything she's ever retched out of her system, rotten and bitter and so horrid that her mind represses the memory of its scent once it's out.

"He's not dead," she says coldly, "Don't talk to me."

It's the only time she says the word.

Back upstairs in the communal dining area, everyone's silence and wary, flickering gaze is a beam hammered in beside her until she is surrounded by it. She understands concern and awkwardness, both borne of Clint not being there – but she doesn't know how to handle it either.

When she catches one of them looking, she tries to meet their gaze with one of her own steady, unwavering looks, but they never stay long enough. Their eyes flit from her to their food, as if they're playing hide-and-seek with each other's faces and lines of sight. She eventually grows tired of this wariness and excuses herself, going into the room Pepper prepared for her months ago, even when she used to hole up in her apartment.

She cannot go back to that loft apartment she has. There is too much there, and, if she will admit it to herself, Natasha is afraid of what it will force her to confront. Here everything is new, unfamiliar, non-threatening. She thinks that maybe she can learn to build a new place alone.

Pepper comes into the room after awhile holding a milkshake, which she sets on the table before coming out to the balcony Natasha is standing in. Natasha has always admired her straight-forwardness, her no-nonsense attitude towards everything, her sincerity and her frankness, but it seems that in this perceived rubble even Pepper no longer has the right logistics to rebuild the world everyone thinks has crumbled. Natasha doesn't quite know what to think.

"You know, I'm – I'm sure he would have wanted to see you at peace," Pepper begins hesitantly, even as the rain begins to fall, golden rays reflecting off buildings and through the drops. Natasha tries to listen to the first few words, but they're old, and she's heard them, she's said them. The rest of what Pepper says dissolves into white noise around her, the same soothing sound as the rainfall. Clint loves the rain. He's always delighted in the cool spray, the puddles on the sidewalk, catching droplets on his tongue.

When the air feels emptier around the both of them, Natasha realises that Pepper has stopped talking, her speech left off at a question that Natasha has no answer to. She replays the past few moments, realises that Pepper is saying to look for them, that they will be around for her, if she would like that. Would she?

She keeps her gaze straight, watching the water that falls relentless, suicidal globes of gold dying on the pavement in loud patters, as though they will not go without a fight. She means to open her mouth, to say that yes, that would be nice, that yes, she will be okay, and she will ask for help if she wants – but then part of her shakes its stubborn head. _She doesn't need help_, her heart says, even as it puts up more rods to the cage she's building again around herself. Nothing's wrong at all. Her partner…he's just not there, and there's nothing to that absence. She means to reassure Pepper of this.

"It's raining again," she says simply, quietly, instead. Pepper presses her lips together in a semblance of a smile (it's tighter, more pained) and folds her arms around Natasha briefly before letting go and walking out of the room.


End file.
